With just a few hours of work today, I built a blend shape TF with dynamic joint pivots in Unity based on what I accomplished in Maya.
VIDEO: https://r2y.com/vid/arm-unity.mp4 1080p 60fps
The example is simple but the method is similar, with the joints' pivots moving inside the blend shape without extra deformation. Unity isn't quite designed for this because modifying a bind pose for a mesh at runtime modifies the mesh asset itself, so I had to write an event handler to restore the bind pose before returning to edit mode. I also had to customize a shader to blend between PBR albedo/normal/roughness maps. Good enough, it all works!
This opens up doing some interactive TFs in VR like we talked about last year.
*rubs hands together wildly*
Last year I had "transformed Vince" in VR with animation and sound, but no TF animation. It was trivial to do a blend shape TF in VR by itself, but I couldn't animate the joints. Now I can combine everything.
Hair and fur growth will still be a hurdle. Hm. I also want to try this in Unreal Engine, which I guess has some XGen tooling. More stuff to learn...
What do you think about a TF carnival of delights in VR?
Cheers!
Paul